Commonly
known as “the
father of peace-and-conflict studies,” Johan Galtung was born
in Oslo, Norway on October 24, 1930 and as a 12-year-old saw his own father arrested by the
Nazis. By 1951 he had become a pacifist who invariably counseled
against any government standing up militarily to a foreign aggressor; he opposed Hungarian resistance against
the Soviet invasion in 1956. Galtung's antipathy for capitalism was
evidenced during that era as well, when he predicted, in 1953, that
the Soviet Union's economy would soon surpass that of the
West.

Galtung earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Oslo in 1956,
and a sociology degree at the same institution the following
year. He then emigrated to New York City, where he spent five
semesters as an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia
University. In 1959 Galtung returned to Oslo, where he founded
the International Peace Research Institute - Oslo (PRIO), where he
would serve for a decade as its director. In 1964, Galtung and PRIO
established the Journal
of Peace Research,
the first academic periodical devoted to that discipline. That same
year, Galtung helped establish the International Peace Research
Association. In 1969 he left PRIO to become a professor of
peace-and-conflict research at the University of Oslo, a position he
held until 1978.

Galtung visited
China during the Cultural Revolution under Mao
Zedong and concluded that the people there were largely happy
because they were, for the most part, “nice
and smiling.” He
stated that while China was “repressive in a certain liberal
sense,” Mao himself was “endlessly liberating when seen from many
other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.”
China, Galtung said, demonstrated that “the whole theory about what
an ‘open society’ is must be rewritten, probably also the theory
of ‘democracy.’” But “it will take a long time,” he
lamented, “before the West will be willing to view China as a
master teacher in such subjects.”

In 1972 Galtung praised
Fidel
Castro’s Cuba for “break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron
grip.” The following year, he declared that the “structural
fascism” of the West was “our time’s grotesque reality.” Also
in 1973, he characterized the United States and Western Europe as
“rich, Western, Christian countries” that historically had waged
war in order to secure their control over natural resources and
foreign markets. “Such an economic system is called capitalism,”
said Galtung, “and when it’s spread in this way to other
countries it’s called imperialism.”

After leaving the
University of Oslo in 1978, Galtung served stints as director general
of the International University Centre in Dubrovnik,
and president of the World Future Studies Federation. He would go on
to hold additional academic posts at Columbia University, Princeton
University, the University of Hawaii, the University of Santiago
(Chile), and the United
Nations University in Geneva. He also has published more than
1,000 articles and over 100 books.

In
1993 Galtung co-founded an organization known as “Transcend
International – A Peace, Development and Environment Network,”
whose mission is “to
bring about a more peaceful world by using action,
education/training, dissemination and research to handle conflicts
with empathy, nonviolence and creativity.”

Galtung contends
that “the United States is extremely unskilled in solving
conflicts” because it “divides the world into two, the good and
the bad,” and it has a “mindset” that “calls for some kind of
armageddon, some kind of final battle” to be fought against its
purportedly evil adversaries. When the U.S. bombed Kosovo in 1999,
Galtung likened America to Nazi Germany. On other occasions, he has
described the United States as a “killer country” that is guilty
of “neo-fascist state terrorism,” and he has predicted that
America will soon follow Great Britain “into the graveyard of
empires.”

According to Galtung, American foreign policies cause
“unbearable suffering and resentment” around the world because
the “exploiters/ killers/ dominators/ alienators, and those who
support the U.S. Empire because of perceived benefits” are engaging
in “unequal, non-sustainable, exchange patterns.” In 2004 Galtung
predicted that the United States would cease to be a functioning
superpower by the year 2020. He asserted, moreover, that the country
would go through a phase as a fascist dictatorship during its
downward spiral, and that the Patriot
Act was a symptom of that fascism.

In
an effort to punish the United States for its international
transgressions, Galtung has called
for a “civil
society boycott of U.S. consumer products (like colas, burgers and
gasoline), capital goods (like Boeing aircraft for travel when there
are alternatives, Boeing being a major death factory), and financial
goods (dollars, stocks, bonds).”

Galtung's
contempt for the United States pervades also his sentiments toward
America's close ally Israel. He has accused
both countries of practicing “state terrorism.” In 2008 he
condemned
“the
U.S. and Israel” for “sharing the bad karma of being built on
stolen land [and] pushing the inhabitants into bantustans or worse.”